Larger Than Life (Novella) (11 page)

At that, I break into a run. I fly down the path of the researchers’ village toward
my hut. A flashlight has been rigged to hang over the porch, where Neo sits with Lesego.
His hand strokes the stark planes of her brow, the sunken cheeks. I can see the knobs
of her spine. She has deteriorated so far, so fast.

I’ve left her before, but for minutes at a time. How long had she waited for me before
beginning to give up?

Neo looks up at me, his face ravaged.

“I’m back, Lesego,” I croon to the calf. She struggles to get up, but she is too weak.
Her eyes are dull, flat. Her skin sags, sallow, under her chin. I try to lift her
head, but it is too heavy; instead, I curl my body around hers, as if I could will
her my strength.

As it turns out, you
can
love someone too much.

Then, when they leave, your heart goes missing. And no one can survive that great
a loss.

“You’re going to get better,” I say fiercely. “You’re going to a new home in South
Africa.” But even as I make this promise, I realize it’s one I can’t keep, unless
I stay there with her.
Be careful what you wish for
, I think. When I’d walked her to Mpho’s
herd, I’d thought I could not live without her … when all along, she was the one who
could not live without
me
.

I try to feed Lesego, but she is too weak to take any sustenance. And so, it happens
just after 3:00
A.M
. My cheek is pressed against Lesego’s belly. One minute, I can feel life thrumming
beneath her skin. And the next, it’s gone.

In Tswana, there are two ways to say goodbye.
Tsamaya sentle
means “go well.”
Sala sentle
means “stay well.” It depends on whether you are the one leaving or the one being
left behind.

Once, I came across an elephant herd grazing near a river. There was a calf that was
testing its independence, that had wandered off maybe twenty or thirty yards. I was
certain every female in that herd still knew his whereabouts, as surely as if he were
emitting a radio signal. Suddenly, a crocodile popped out of the water, its jaws wide,
its tongue a pink sponge. The calf’s mother could not see this, because she was around
the river bend. But somehow she knew that calf was in trouble, and she bolted—all
nine thousand pounds of her—moving faster than an animal a fraction of her size. She
was at the calf’s side before I could even turn the ignition in my vehicle to try
to scare off the crocodile. The elephant charged, shoving the baby out of the way
so that it tumbled like a stone being skipped over the surface of the river. Then
she grabbed the crocodile by the tail with her trunk, swung it over her head, and
flung it so that it struck a tree and fell down dead.

The calf scrambled beneath the safe haven of his mother.

When you are truly, deeply scared, that’s the only place you want to be.

I am there when my mother opens her eyes for the first time, postsurgery. “These drugs,”
she said. “I’m seeing things.”

She looks small, wrapped in the hospital gown, with a bandage binding her chest.
Two drains filled with pink fluid hang from the metal rungs of the bed; the tubes
snake under the gauze. It is strange, seeing her like this, no longer strong or in
control. But her face, without makeup, is still so beautiful that I find myself pushing
my hair back from my own face, trying to make myself presentable.

“Mom,” I say, reaching for her hand. One finger glows red, pinched by a pulse-ox meter.

“You look like hell,” my mother says, and a laugh fizzes out of me, the carbonation
of fear.

“I could say the same about you,” I tell her.

I’ve been traveling for twenty-eight straight hours. It seems like ages since I marched
into Grant’s cramped office and told him that I was going home.
You can ask me to leave the program
, I said,
or you can give me a leave of absence
.

How long?
he asked.

I don’t know yet
. And then I finally said it out loud:
My mother is sick
.

You’re a fixer, Grant mused. You’re also a colossal pain in the ass. The thing is,
it’s the pains in the ass that change the world
.

The doctor told me it was a bilateral modified radical mastectomy. He said the tumor
was large, and had spread to the muscles of the chest wall. After this would come
more treatment—chemo or radiation—to kill the cancer cells that were still undetected
and swimming through her bloodstream.

My mother is silent for so long that I think she has drifted to sleep again. But when
I look at her, I realize she is crying—and that it’s something I’ve never seen her
do. “I thought you wouldn’t come,” she says. “I thought I was getting what I deserved.”

I look down at her bandages, at the brown stain of Betadine creeping above the throat
of the gauze, at the IV in the crook of her arm. “This is not what
anyone
deserves,” I say.

The first Western Union telegram had struck me like lightning.
AM SICK. CANCER. COME HOME. XO MOM.
It was the first contact I’d had from my mother in two years, with the exception
of a card that contained a fifty-dollar bill for Christmas and another for my birthday.
Of course, I had not called her, either; it was easy to fight the urge to call someone
you thought had no desire to hear from you.

Until she had no choice, that is.

I think about the shot of tequila I took after reading the telegram, which still did
not render the words invisible. How I’d driven like a maniac through the bush, with
the wind in my face and the branches scratching my arms, desperately trying to feel
anything except guilt.

And then I had found Lesego.

I think some part of my brain believed that if I could unread the words, if I could
pretend that telegram had never arrived, then it would not be true. If I didn’t talk
about it, it wouldn’t exist. I knew how science worked. If you did not look too closely
you’d never see the malignant cells. After I got the telegram I did not respond to
my mother or fly home because then I would have had to admit to myself that this was
real. That my mother, whose disappointment I had feared and whose love I had chased,
was not invincible.

Maybe it is the jet lag, maybe it is remorse. I press my cheek to the scratchy white
sheet and sob. I am crying for my mother. I am crying for Lesego. I’m crying for Neo.
I’m crying for all the things we lose that we cannot get back. “You were right,” I
confess. “I never should have left Cambridge. I should have stayed at Harvard and
studied those stupid monkeys and then you wouldn’t have been mad at me for two years.”

“You thought I was mad at you?” she said. “I thought you were mad at
me
. You never called or wrote.”

“You never said goodbye,”
I blurt out.

In the long silence, I feel minuscule, petty.

“I couldn’t go to that airport, Alice,” my mother sighs. “Not because I was angry.
Because I didn’t trust myself to let you go.”

Her hand rises from the bed and comes to rest heavy on my head. She strokes my hair.
“For someone who knows so much about the brain,” my mother says, “you know absolutely
nothing about the heart.”

In the wild, a mother elephant and her daughter will stay together until one or the
other
dies. But there is one exception: In a year when there are limited resources—a drought,
say, or a herd that has grown too big to sustain feeding all its members in a given
area—the matriarch may make the decision to split the group. She will lead some of
the elephants off in one direction, and her daughter will lead the rest on another
route. They are still family, but they know that being together will bring about high
mortality for the herd, that there is a better chance of survival when they aren’t
competing for the same resources.

But things change. When the land blossoms and the rivers run flush again, the mother
and daughter reunite. It’s a celebration, a fanfare. There is trumpeting, roaring,
touching, stroking. It’s like they have never been apart.

Sometimes, when I sit in my mother’s hospital room, watching her do the spider crawling
exercises along the wall to build her range of motion—or weeks later, when I drive
her to her chemo treatments, I look out the window and see Africa. Gone are the dismal
gray slush of mud season in New England and shivering fingers of the naked trees.
Instead I picture the sun, squatting wide on the horizon just before it bursts on
the pinprick of night. I watch the silhouettes of giraffes lope across the clearing,
and I hear the giddy delight of the hyenas. I feel Lesego bumping up behind me, and
I listen to the song of Neo’s voice.

I had to learn how to be a mother before I realized how lucky I am to be a child.
And since the doctors don’t know for sure how long that opportunity will last, I only
let Africa breathe beneath my skin and on the backs of my eyelids. I don’t let myself
pine for it. One day, I’ll go back. Today is not that day.

Today, I will take care of her.

And maybe, in the window boxes, plant marigolds.

THE END

If you enjoyed meeting Alice in
Larger Than Life …

You won’t want to miss Jodi Picoult’s new novel
,
Leaving Time
.

Coming in hardcover and eBook in October 2014.

For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother,
Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to
believe that she would have been abandoned as a young child, Jenna searches for her
mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist
who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals
she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts.
As Jenna’s memories dovetail with the events in her mother’s journals, the story races
to a mesmerizing finish. A deeply moving, gripping, and intelligent page-turner,
Leaving Time
is Jodi Picoult at the height of her powers.